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Topic: How do you put in the information about multiple genres? (Read 4933 times) previous topic - next topic
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How do you put in the information about multiple genres?

Many bands do not have a clear genre, and the view in which looks

Black Metal, Symphonic Black Metal, Gothic Metal, Death Metal
Gothic Metal, Death Metal, Doom Metal, Melodic Death Metal
Symphonic Metal, Gothic Metal, Female Fronted Metal

etc...

this creates an unnecessary variety in filtering. Narrowing down to metal is also unacceptable, for discogs, allmusic for example there are 2 tags

for example

Genre
        Rock
Styles
        Death Metal
        Heavy Metal
        Scandinavian Metal


Re: How do you put in the information about multiple genres?

Reply #1 –
I guess that would come down to personal preference and how much effort you want to spend organizing music styles.
The way I'm managing this is I base my music styles largely on the consensus of what rateyourmusic.com says it is (usually on a per album basis, sometimes on a track basis). RYM has a large database of all kinds of genres all arranged in hierarchical (and sometimes parallel) structure.

I usually take the most descriptive genre applicable and also use the entire genre tree above it. if you want this can be placed in a multi value tag. Say for example the album "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana which is Grunge music so the genre tag would be:
Rock; Alternative Rock; Grunge
Grunge being a subgenre of Alternative Rock and that being itself a subgenre of Rock.

This then allows me the flexibility to filter broadly on Rock music or very detailed on Grunge music.
If you don't like multi value tags you just split them up into separate tags
Genre_level_1: Rock
Genre_level_2: Alternative Rock
Genre_level_3: Grunge

Of course using this method choices have to be made. If something sounds equally like Heavy Metal or Hard Rock then choose the one most applicable, you can't have both.
The measure of detail is also your own choice, I usually go up to 4 levels deep in a tree when applicable but if 2 is sufficient (Rock- Alternative Rock) then that's fine too, it's less effort.

Re: How do you put in the information about multiple genres?

Reply #2 –
I find genres very difficult, because I do not have good enough knowledge of music history. Often artists cross over into new styles, experiment, or become more mainstream on an album, which calls for the "pop" tag (pop rock, pop rap). Maybe the new style will retroactively become a genre in the future. The classification of genres seem to detract from enjoying the music, because I want my tags to be perfect, which cannot be realized with genres. Often I feel the need of re-assessing the genres of an album after some time.

Typically I just add genres from Wikipedia as equal level multivalue "tags" under %genre%. There is no distiction between genre and style. I also add styles that consistently appear on Discogs in more than one edition. On Discogs genres/styles often are vague or generic, because submitters focus on other aspects of the edition (catalog, country, matrix). I was not aware of Rate Your Music as a source of information. I do not do any filtering by genre usually, and never display them in a tree structure.

Since many players only read the first value of a multivalue field, I make that to be the most general (rock). You could also choose it to be the most specific (doom metal) if you want.

Since there is so much uncertainty with genres, I do not usually add specific ones to individual tracks. I also cannot use any resource to help me decide on the genre of a particular song. Single releases on Wikipedia do have a genre indicated, but it seems not to be vetted as carefully as with albums. The album gets tagged with styles that appear on any of its tracks. I add no more than 3 genres for an album, because I hate when the field is long enough that a horizontal scrollbar appears in the Selection Properties window in Foobar.

I'm not very familiar with metal music. Maybe "heavy metal" is applicable to all the styles. With a multivalue field you can separate "metal" from "abcd metal" in Foobar, which you couldn't do if the list of genres was one string.

Re: How do you put in the information about multiple genres?

Reply #3 –
Quote from: Mrakobes on
Many bands do not have a clear genre, and the view in which looks

Black Metal, Symphonic Black Metal, Gothic Metal, Death Metal
Gothic Metal, Death Metal, Doom Metal, Melodic Death Metal
Symphonic Metal, Gothic Metal, Female Fronted Metal

etc...

this creates an unnecessary variety in filtering.

Genres are abstractions, their purpose is not a thorough description of the music. When assigning a genre to a track you can and have to make a choice: you should always acknowledge one approach only as the fundamental inspiration to that composition or music production. If you can't, it is likely your music genre definitions are wrong.

However, if you really want to use multiple genres, have you thought of splitting values?


I also encourage a multi-level genre classification as suggested by jazzthieve (even though I have a terrible opinion of rateyourmusic genre-tree  :-X).
This is how I handle it. In the same thread, you might also find interesting Daeron's system for handling multiple genre tags.
I'm late

Re: How do you put in the information about multiple genres?

Reply #5 –
As davideleo already mentioned, here's my original post that describes the system I'm using. There are couple things I'd like to add.

Things like rateyourmusic/wikipedia/last.fm are pretty good sources to get a general sense of what other people think a band should be. Especially when you are just starting your collection/branching out into genres you are unfamiliar with (e.g. "it's some kind of metal"). Since the broadest classifications generally match across sites/people's opinions, they give you a pretty good basis to start from. Possibly even give you a bit of a history lesson in the description of the band's music or the category itself which will be beneficial over time.

I find multivalue tags a requirement that you can't skip without paying a major loss in information. Many bands simply don't belong to one category. Some go out of their way to linger at the borders of two (or more) seemingly randomly picked genres. Others will predominantly pick one, but still use elements from somewhere else. In either case I feel not mentioning these somewhere would be a shame, especially when your bubble of similar sounding bands starts to overpopulate and those small nuances are exactly what would allow you to meaningfully differentiate between them. Sticking too strictly/trying to copy some of the sites which attempt to categorize music into nice trees generally runs into this problem. Jazzthieve and j7n mentioned this already.

Not being locked into a rigid structure means your collection can grow naturally and requires less effort to maintain. You can start by tagging something "metal" and only have to describe it in finer details (e.g. death/heavy/melodic/power etc) if later that bubble is starting to grow too big. By that time it is reasonable to assume that you went through numerous band's descriptions and gained a basic understanding of how the various subgenres of metal stand up to each other and you'll be capable of categorizing them yourself. The important takeaway is that with this method your library can have less detail in one area while simultaneously having meticulous detail in other categories. This mimics how our brains work. You might know a lot about electronic music but also happen to have some metal songs that you don't particularly care about. Do they need the same kind of care for your use? At the same time, if later you do get more familiar with metal, it is very straightforward to expand on the foundation you already made.

I would also encourage you to use words that are meaningful to you. The main purpose of tagging your files is so *you* can quickly and efficiently filter your library for the tracks you had in mind. I see no benefits in trying to stick to what external sources say on the finer details - many which don't agree among themselves - for the privilege of having to constantly translate your thoughts between what you think the band sounds like and what the site decided upon. This even applies if the site was technically correct (which I would argue many times is not the case to begin with). But if that was the case, it is also really easy to go back and update your tags retroactively when you became wiser. Your library might also eventually grow big enough where traditional genre descriptions are not enough on their own to differentiate between artists at sufficient granularity and you'll have to use somewhat subjective words anyway. This approach is also a good exercise to simply think about music in general.

Re: How do you put in the information about multiple genres?

Reply #6 –
Daeron, thanks for the answer, I'll experiment, the filter shows in my collection 1680 genres)))

Re: How do you put in the information about multiple genres?

Reply #7 –
Quote from: davideleo on
This is how I handle it. In the same thread, you might also find interesting Daeron's system for handling multiple genre tags.
I'm interested in you way to handle this. I followed the link but I'm not sure I understood how to implement the system:
do you mind to let me know the details of how to use the customdb features to build a semi-automatic system like yours?

Thanks.

Re: How do you put in the information about multiple genres?

Reply #8 –
Edit: removed erroneous double post

Re: How do you put in the information about multiple genres?

Reply #9 –
Quote from: fabiospark on
Quote from: davideleo on
This is how I handle it. In the same thread, you might also find interesting Daeron's system for handling multiple genre tags.
I'm interested in you way to handle this. I followed the link but I'm not sure I understood how to implement the system:
do you mind to let me know the details of how to use the customdb features to build a semi-automatic system like yours?

Thanks.


Sure, here's what I did, step by step. After installing the custom_db component, I added two new custom fields (Preferences -> Tools -> Custom Database -> Fields tab -> click Add button) with the following properties:

display: genre_family
name: GENRE_FAMILY
key: %genre% (custom option)

display: genre_class
name: GENRE_CLASS
key: %genre_family% (custom option)


At this step the virtual genre tree is ready, but in order to fill it with data we need the related commands, therefore I added two actions (Preferences -> Tools -> Custom Database -> Action tab -> click Add button)  with the following properties:

Display: remap genre
Field: genre_family
Update: ContextMenu -> Dialog
Set value: (leave this blank)

Display: remap genre_family
Field: genre_class
Update: ContextMenu -> Dialog
Set value: (leave this blank)


Each of these commands is now available in the context menu under the "Legacy commands (unsorted)" sub-menu. Both commands open a dialog window where you can edit the virtual field indicated in the Field property: "remap genre" edits the genre_family field and "remap genre_family" edits the genre_class field.

Once you have the commands listed in the context menu, you can run them with custom buttons or PSS and Jscript functions. I actually never use the context menu commands: in my PSS configuration I have a nowplaying panel with track info, where some labels are actually text buttons that run the custom_db commands as you can see in the attached picture. The genre tag is labeled "style", the genre_family tag is labeled "sub-genre" and the genre_class tag is labeled "genre". If I want to edit the Trip Hop's genre family (Breakbeat) I click on the subgenre label to open the genre_family dialog window, if I want to edit the Breakbeat's genre class (Electronica) I click on the genre label to open the genre_class dialog window.

VERY IMPORTANT: use version 0.09a of the custom_db plug-in, later versions crash if you attempt to create autoplaylists or run queries based on custom tags.

This is it. I hope I've been thorough enough, if not I'll be glad to give you more details.


P.S.
I use the same system for artist and genre rating as well as for some other artist related tags, such as nationality.
I'm late

Re: How do you put in the information about multiple genres?

Reply #10 –
Thanks for the detailed explanation.

I did as you explained but I have a couple of questions:

- when I trigger the "remap genre" command in the context menu,
after having selected a track, in the bottom pane of the
custom database I see nothing, while in the top one I can see %GENRE_FAMILY%.
The same if the selected track is playing.

- how do I show the content of the two custom fields?
In a track info mod panel I tried %genre_family% and %GENRE_FAMILY% and I can't see anything.
But it can be because there is nothing to show (question above).

In the tracks I selected, the %genre% is set and it has a single value.

Thanks.

Re: How do you put in the information about multiple genres?

Reply #11 –
Quote from: fabiospark on
- when I trigger the "remap genre" command in the context menu,
after having selected a track, in the bottom pane of the
custom database I see nothing, while in the top one I can see %GENRE_FAMILY%.
The same if the selected track is playing.

Yes, that's expected. Once the plug-in is installed and the custom fields and actions set, the database table is still empty. What you call the bottom pane is the textbox where you edit the genre_family (for the genre of the selected track) and it is blank because no genre_family has been defined for that genre yet.


Quote from: fabiospark on
- how do I show the content of the two custom fields?

In the properties dialog they're in the Details tab, as if it were technical information (see attached picture), but they're available like proper fields for titleformatting expressions in all components I've tested so far, including PSS, all playlist and library viewers and query syntax.


Quote from: fabiospark on
In a track info mod panel I tried %genre_family% and %GENRE_FAMILY% and I can't see anything.
But it can be because there is nothing to show (question above).

The bad news is that this is probably the only component that cannot read foo_customdb fields (foo_customdb limitations).
The good news is that it can be easily replaced with a panel stack splitter.



I'm late

Re: How do you put in the information about multiple genres?

Reply #12 –
Quote from: davideleo on
Quote from: fabiospark on
- when I trigger the "remap genre" command in the context menu,
after having selected a track, in the bottom pane of the
custom database I see nothing, while in the top one I can see %GENRE_FAMILY%.
The same if the selected track is playing.

Yes, that's expected. Once the plug-in is installed and the custom fields and actions set, the database table is still empty. What you call the bottom pane is the textbox where you edit the genre_family (for the genre of the selected track) and it is blank because no genre_family has been defined for that genre yet.
Do you mean that I will have to do the remapping by hand?
I thought I would have been able to trigger an automatic remapping
copying values from genre to genre_family just firing the action in the context menu.
Did I understand all that wrong?

Thanks.
 

Re: How do you put in the information about multiple genres?

Reply #13 –
Quote from: fabiospark on
Did I understand all that wrong?

I think so, but on my side I'm not sure I understood your question.
You have to do the mapping once and than foo_customdb will know for ever after what genre family a genre belongs to.
I'm late